Cotulla looks beyond oil

Cotulla looks beyond oil

1of5A four-story Hampton Inn was under construction in January in the Las Palmas area in Cotulla.Photo: Photos by Tom Reel / San Antonio Express-News

2of5Workers prepare equipment for a disposal well being drilled south of Cotulla on January 26, 2013. Pioneer Drilling Company proceeds at 4000 feet, going to 5,300 feet so that Bosque Systems can set up the operation which returns treated water to the lower Wilcox aquifer.Photo: San Antonio Express-News

3of5Some of the new roads in the Garros Subdivision just off IH35 in Cotulla sport an appropriate names on January 26, 2013.Photo: San Antonio Express-News

4of5A new hotel rises behind a newly finished one in Cotulla on January 26, 2013.Photo: San Antonio Express-News

5of5Soon to be opened businesses advertise in the La Palmas area in Cotulla on January 26, 2013.Photo: San Antonio Express-News

Cotulla — COTULLA — It's hard to see anything besides oil in a landscape that includes the nonstop rumble of 18-wheelers, about a dozen new hotels and a lunchtime army of white contractor pickups at every restaurant.

But local officials are trying.

Cotulla is trying to position itself for the day when the Eagle Ford Shale oil boom busts and drilling activity shifts to other regions.

“Cotulla is not just about oil. It's not just about gas,” said City Administrator Larry Dovalina, who spoke at an Eagle Ford event this month in Cotulla's new convention center. “It's about all of the activity that is coming into the community.”

A new report from the Texas A&M Engineering Extension Service details growth in Cotulla, the La Salle County seat — everything from a new airport runway to engineering work for a new industrial park.

Among the ideas for the city to branch out beyond the oil patch: creating a downtown gas-light district, adding a new rodeo arena, building a regional sports complex for softball and baseball games, and creating a foreign-trade zone for the airport and a new 33-acre industrial park.

John Adams, program director of Texas A&M Engineering Extension Service, speaking at the Eagle Ford event organized by Texas A&M University-Kingsville, called Cotulla and La Salle County the “poster child” for the boom.

“You have this boom and this change in the community, and someone must address this. You cannot stand still,” Adams said. “If you do not plan, you will be left behind. You will be left with a larger amount of problems than what you had.”

Dovalina said the idea is to use the energy boom to fix up what's old and prepare for the future.

But the Eagle Ford has become an overwhelming presence in Cotulla.

The first successful Eagle Ford well was announced by Petrohawk in La Salle County in October 2008, and oil production in the county skyrocketed from 165,000 barrels in 2008 to 21.9 million barrels last year.

As of September, this year La Salle County had yielded 28.5 million barrels, according to the Texas Railroad Commission, and it's become something of a transportation and logistics hub for the western part of the Eagle Ford Shale.

Cotulla has some history as a crossroads. It started as a raucous railroad town in the 1880s when the International-Great Northern Railroad was expanding to the Mexican border.

Now it's part of a wave of midstream development in the Eagle Ford as companies build the gathering systems, pipelines and processing plants to move South Texas oil and gas to market. It's also on Interstate 37 and sits midway between San Antonio, Laredo and Corpus Christi.

There's the 500-acre Gardendale Railroad with around 29 miles of track and the ability to move anything from sand for hydraulic fracturing to pipe or crude oil. A few years ago it didn't exist — it was an abandoned rail line that disappeared into the brush.

Just outside Cotulla, The Woodlands-based Anadarko Petroleum Corp. built a $100 million plant to process natural gas.

The historically poor school district, where a young Lyndon Baines Johnson spent a year teaching at the Welhausen School, is now considered rich, despite the fact that 82 percent of its students qualify for reduced lunch programs.

Adams said the Cotulla report is part of a larger study looking at 15 counties south of the Nueces River.

“There is over $40 billion in construction that will be under way in the next 18 months,” Adams said. “This is contracted, ready to go. You can see this is getting ready to take off.”

Some of the non-oil-related recent activity includes the newly restored La Salle County Courthouse, which reopened at the beginning of the year. The city is trying to revitalize its downtown, and plans to build a new city hall. There's also the Garros subdivision, the first new subdivision to be developed in the county in 30 years.

Work has started to make the Cotulla-La Salle County Airport's runway the longest in the region, at 6,001 feet (besting the runways at the Alice and Kleberg County airports by a few feet). A new privately-funded $800,000 hangar and fuel storage system is also planned.

Adams said that something like a six- to eight-field sports complex could allow the city to host regional tournaments. “Abilene does it. Amarillo. Bryan-College Station,” he said. “There is no center in South Texas for sports.”

An immediate issue is the migration of oil-field workers into La Salle County — the ability to fill jobs locally is one of the biggest challenges to communities across South Texas. “The real Achilles heel is the workforce,” Adams said. “We have employees that have to be brought into this community to work.”

Dovalina said it's a matter of training and education.

Water is another challenge facing South Texas communities over the next several decades.

Kevin Kluge, a manager with the Texas Water Development Board, said that rural counties in the Eagle Ford region can expect to see their populations grow by about 78 percent by 2070, and that water use for hydraulic fracturing will peak around 2030.

Dovalina said the report gives the city some planning guidance for the years ahead, as well as data and it can provide to businesses it wants to lure, including large retailers such as Walmart or H-E-B.

“We were trying to bring a competitive grocery store,” Dovalina said. “Because part of what's going on here is there's a great amount of price gouging. It involves housing, it involves food supplies. Some people get hurt. They can't compete with the per diems that are available to the oil and gas workers, and so we're trying to create a balance.”

That balance also means the city remembers its roots and the way that many landowners kept afloat before oil.

On a recent Friday, signs up all over town included this message, aimed at greeting the region's more traditional business customer, who comes seeking the area's famed trophy deer: “Welcome Hunters.”

Jennifer Hiller covers the Eagle Ford Shale, the massive oil and gas field in South Texas. She previously covered real estate, development and architecture for the Express-News. Jennifer has worked at several newspapers across Texas, as well as at the Honolulu Advertiser and Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. She's a Houston native and a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin, where she received a degree in journalism.